In the past week, my little brother's Irish Wolfhound puppy has chewed into two bottles of my pills. On both occasions, my sister in law found the emptied bottles, and rightly so, became quite concerned.The first time was a 60 pill bottle of 150mg Wellbutrin (bupropion) and the second was a 15 pill bottle of 5mg Abilify (aripiprazole). We did what normal adults do in the 21st century: we googled canine drug overdoses before actually calling a veterinarian so that we wouldn't sound silly.
There isn't that much information available for human overdoses, let alone for dog overdoses. This became apparent when I called an emergency veterinarian and they basically said that they had no idea.
I turned to my go-to source for medical papers, the NIH's PubMed site (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed).
The first time was the Wellbutrin
- 9g overdose in adult female - non-fatal, but with complications
- 23g overdose in adult male - fatal
Assume a woman weighs 150lb (68kg), and you get a non-fatal dose at 0.13g/kg.
Assume a man weights 190lb (86kg), and you get a fatal dose at 0.27g/kg.
So in the case of Seamus, a 75lb (34kg) "puppy:"
7 pills * 150mg = 1050mg = 1.05g
He could have had, at most (0.03g/kg). So all in all, it was going to probably be OK. As I was multiplying this out, my sister-in-law found six pills under the dresser, and we relaxed a lot more.
As I write this, I realize that the woman probably has the exact same prescription I do.
A week later, he got the bottle of Abilify, and I found a report of a 2.5 year old kid taking 195mg.
15 pills * 5mg = 75mg
I didn't even do further math, as he took about 2.5 times less than a child he is probably about twice the size of.
